Our adventurous youth felt much relieved to have set affairs in such good train—if likewise a good deal plagued by his cough and the heavy-headedness caused by his catarrh—and now he began to live each day as it came—a day which never varied, which was always broken up into a number of sections, and which, in its abiding uniformity, could not be said either to pass too fast or to hang too heavy on the hands. In the morning the bathing-master would give a mighty thump on the door and enter—a nervous individual named Turnherr, who wore his sleeves rolled up, and had great standing veins upon his forearms, and a gurgling, impeded speech. He addressed Hans Castorp, as he did all the patients, by the number of his room, and rubbed him with alcohol. Not long after he left, Joachim would appear ready dressed, to greet his cousin, inquire after his seven o’clock temperature, and communicate his own. While he breakfasted below, Hans Castorp did the same above, his down quilt tucked behind his back, in enjoyment of the good appetite a change engenders. He was scarcely disturbed by the bustling and businesslike entrance of the two physicians, who at this hour made a hurried round of the dining-hall and the rooms of the bedridden and moribund. Hans Castorp, with his mouth full of jam, announced himself to have slept “splendidly” and looked over the rim of his cup at the Hofrat, who leaned with his fists on the centre table, and hastily scanned the fever chart. Both physicians wished him good morning, and he responded in an unconcerned drawl as they went out. Then he lighted a cigarette, and beheld Joachim returning from the morning walk, almost before he realized his departure. Again they chatted of this and that; Joachim went to lie down until second breakfast, and the interval seemed so short that even the emptiest-headed could hardly have felt bored. Hans Castorp, indeed, had so much food for thought in the events of the past three weeks, so much to ponder in his present state and what might come of it, that although two bound volumes of an illustrated periodical from the Berghof library lay upon his night-table, he had no need to resort to them.
It was no different with the brief hour during which Joachim took his regular walk down to the Platz. He came in to Hans Castorp afterwards, told him whatever of interest he had seen, and sat or stood a few minutes by the sickbed before he withdrew to his own balcony for the midday rest. And how long did that last? Again, only a brief hour. It seemed to Hans Castorp he had barely settled to commune a little with his own thoughts, hands folded behind his head and eyes directed upon the ceiling, before the gong droned through the house, summoning all those not bedridden or moribund to prepare for the principal meal of the day.
Joachim went down, and the “midday broth” was brought—“broth” in a symbolic sense merely, considering in what it consisted. Hans Castorp was not on sick-diet. He lay there and paid full pension, and what they brought him in the abiding present of that midday hour was by no means broth, it was the full six-course Berghof dinner, in all its amplitude, with nothing left out. Even on weekdays this was a sumptuous meal; on Sundays it was a gala banquet and “gaudy,” prepared by a cosmopolitan chef in the kitchens of the establishment, which were precisely those of a European hotel deluxe. The “dining-room girl” whose duty it was to serve the bedridden brought it to him in dainty cook-pots under nickel-plated dish-covers. She produced an invalid-table, a marvel of one-legged equilibrium, adjusted it across his bed, and Hans Castorp banqueted like the tailor’s son in the fairy-story.
As he finished, Joachim would return, and it might be as late as half past two before the latter went into his loggia, and the hush of the main rest period fell upon the Berghof. Not quite, perhaps; perhaps it would be nearer the truth to call it a quarter after, but these odd quarter-hours outside the round figures do not count, they are swallowed up unregarded, in places where one reckons time in large units—on long train journeys of many hours on end, or wherever one is in a state of vacant suspense, with all one’s being concentrated on pulling the time behind one. A quarter past two will pass for half past, will even pass for three, on the theory that it is already well on the way toward it. The thirty minutes are taken as a sort of onset to the full hour from three to four, and inwardly discounted. In this wise the duration of the main rest period was finally reduced to no more than an hour; and even this hour was lopped off at its latter end, elided, as
